Article in today’s New York Times, “Digitally, Location Is Where It’s At”:
To someone not in their 20s whose location generally isn’t that interesting to others — that would be me — the idea of handing over your privacy with both hands to strap on a digital ankle bracelet sounds profoundly unattractive. . . . But to a younger cohort that lives on the grid, the location of people you know and care about is vital information, the coin of the realm.
Article on the Advertising Age web site today, “Forget FourSquare: Why Location Marketing Is New Point-Of-Purchase”:
It’s the ad served while you are reading the news in the morning on an e-reader that knows you’re at home and three blocks from a Starbucks. It’s a loyalty program on your phone that, through a hotel-room sensor, sets the lights and thermostat and turns the TV to CNN when you walk in the door. It’s finding a restaurant in a strange city on a Tuesday night, discovering that a store nearby stocks the TV you’re looking for, or that a certain grocery on the way home has the cut of meat you need.
Forget Foursquare or Gowalla: Soon every website and service will be able to tell where you are, opening up the floodgates for location-based marketing and blurring the budget lines for advertisers.
